James May

The wheel thing

One of the few things that Jeremy Clarkson and I agree about
is that the world, overall, is getting better.

Traditionally, everyone over the age of 45 believes that the
place is going to hell in a handcart, but if you think about this, it can't be
true. Presumably, people have been saying as much since William the Conqueror
arrived, and if it were actually happening we'd have got there long ago.

In truth, everything improves. Life expectancy lengthens,
standards of living rise overall, more diseases are banished and people in
Manchester no longer have to eat coal. I can't imagine a single aspect of
plague- and jester-ridden mediaeval life that would have been better than the
one we enjoy today.

Certainly, every artefact of man's making gets better. The
car certainly does, but so do things that have been with us for centuries, such
as the mechanisms of wristwatches, cement and woodworking tools. Very few
things have reached the peak of their development and stayed there.

But there are one or two. One that springs to mind is the
Mouli cheese grater, a device that allows single men to make Welsh Rarebit
without the ends of their own fingers in it. I've studied mine very carefully
and can't see how it could be improved. Better materials would make no
difference, and its dimensions and simple mechanism seem to have been perfectly
refined. I've had mine for 20 years and the one you buy today is exactly the
same. Mouli grater - sorted.

Another is the rubber bathroom sink plug. The French
popularised the type that is shaped like a metal mushroom and operated by a
lever on the tap assembly, but they never fit properly and let all the water
out. My downstairs guest bathroom has a sort of silvery disc that pivots in its
hole, and I knew when I bought the sink that it would leak like a government
ministry.

It's all very well trying to express your 'design literacy'
through your choice of bathroom fittings, but sooner or later, you're going to
have to admit that only a rubber bung on the end of a chain is truly reliable.
We've known it for several hundred years. Sink plug - job done.

"Traditionally, everyone over the age of 45 believes that the place is going to hell in a handcart”

And now to the steering wheel. As a means of steering a car,
I really don't think it can be beaten. Early cars had tiller arrangements, like
boats, and I believe there may have been attempts to steer them with the feet,
but the steering wheel had been adopted by Benz before 1900, and even British
Leyland couldn't improve on it, although they tried with that quartic nonsense.

Elsewhere, and more recently, joystick control has been
tried. Saab came up with such a system, and it worked at an academic level, but
not so well that they let anyone drive it on a real road. More recently, it has
been possible to engineer in feedback with elaborate sensors and
microprocessors, but what's the point? Perfect feedback can already be achieved
by joining a wheel to the steering mechanism with pieces of metal, so why
remove that and then try to replicate it?

The steering wheel is a perfectly logical, truly analogue
triumph for the man/machine interface, and I don't believe it will ever be
usurped so long as the car is with us. Steering wheel - rock on.

Imagine my dismay when I learned that some people in the
automotive engineering community now believe that cars in the future will be
steered with two thumb-operated buttons, in the style of the Playboy gaming
console. If, like me, you've ever wasted any of your life away on one of these
things, you will know this is a stupid idea. Opposed thumbs may be what
separate us from the beasts of the field, but they were not meant for steering
cars.

What worries me, though, is that the first car I ever drove
was a real one, on a real road. Now, however, a new generation of drivers is
emerging; one that learned to drive through virtual Britain on a Gamestation.
Is it possible that thumbsteer for them is as intuitive as a wheel is for me?
That the steering wheel only makes sense because that's how I was nurtured?
That a wheel-guided car might seem as preposterous to them as a buttock-operated
Mouli grater would to me?

I don't believe it, not at all. But I've just
realised something. By the time you read this, I'll be 45, and the world will
be going to hell in a handcart. I'll see you there. I'll be the bloke in the
small Fiat with the funny circular thing in it.